March 30, 2009

Broken Windows, Subways, and Crime

The danger in New York City of subway cuts and transit fare hikes looms. Keeping the transit system in decent shape affects more than your commute to work. It’s a public safety issue. The proposed MTA “doomsday” service cuts puts the past 15 years of public-safety gains in jeopardy.

Many factors contributing to New York City’s crime drop, but a huge part was better policing and a focus on minor and not-so-minor quality-of-life issues, the so called Broken Windows. New York City’s great crime drop was both unpredicted and unprecedented, and it started on the subways. Broken Windows, as formulated by James Q Wilson and George Kelling, says that an unfixed broken window, figuratively speaking, is a sign that nobody cares. This leads to increased disorder, fear, and crime.

It’s easy to forget how bad things were in the early 1990s. The city was still seen as out of control and, as the New York Times wrote, fear was constant: “Crime, the fear of it as much as the fact, adds overtones of a New Beirut” in a city “bristling with beggars and sad schizophrenics tuned in to inner voices.” In 1990 2,245 were killed. Then crime started going down. It went down fastest in the subway.

Then transit Police Chief William Bratton focused on the Broken Windows of the subway: turnstile jumping, aggressive begging, and homeless people—many with stunning hygiene needs—using the subway as a free 24-hour shelter. In 1991, crime dropped three times as fast underground as above. By 1994, the subways were safer. Much safer. Felonies had dropped by one-third in three years. Successes in the subway told the city’s tax-payers that they could beat the criminals The great crime drop had swung into gear. A tipping point had been reached.

Over the past 25 years, many of the city’s broken windows have been fixed. As an improved transit system—started with investment and the virtual elimination of graffiti in the 1980s—lead the way. While academics continue to debate the causal link between disorder and crime, a Broken Windows’s approach resulted in a massively safer New York City and the simply concept that policing and quality-of-life issues matter.

Since then, tourist spending in New York City has doubled to $29 billion per year. Compared to that, the $1.2 billion needed to close the MTA’s budget gap is a drop in the bucket. Just a few muggings and “random” crimes shown on YouTube will cost the city and state far more than what the MTA needs to keep moving forward.

Dirtier stations, less maintenance, fewer station attendants, longer waits, and aggressive teenagers tell the public that nobody is in control. With increased fear, fewer people will use the streets and subways, giving criminals a greater opportunity to act. Fear and crime thrive in systems of disorder and decline. With crime and fear, suddenly a vicious cycle is born. That’s why the proposed cuts to MTA service are so dire.

It is not inevitable that tough economic times bring more crime. Murders in New York were up last year to 523 from 496 in 2007. This is worrisome, but not so much because the numbers are bad. They’re not. But in tough times, it is particularly important to prevent a slide back to New York City’s bloody past. Crime could go down even further. Canada has a few more murders than New York City but with four times the population. With continued good policing and public funding, we could move in that direction.

Or we could slip back. It is possible, with bad public planning and the self-fulfilling idea that crime and violence will increase. MTA service cuts affect more than service. The doomsday cuts can lead to a real doomsday with thousands of New Yorkers again being killed each year. In her classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs wrote, “We must understand that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary though they are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves.” Service cuts equal more disorder, fear, and crime.

In tough economic times, the subway is the last service that should be cut, not the first. There’s no reason we can’t slide to New York’s dark ages. But it doesn’t have to be this way, but if we lose the subways, the city will follow. Subway cuts are the first step to breaking our city’s windows, the same windows that have so painstakingly been fixed over the past twenty years. And that will be the most costly mistake of all.

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Peter Moskos is a professor and chair of the Department of Law, Police Science, and Criminal Justice Administration at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is the director of John Jay's NYPD Executive Master's Program, on the faculty of the City University of New York's Doctoral Programs in Sociology, and a Senior Fellow of the Yale Urban Ethnography Project.

Moskos graduated from Princeton (AB) and Harvard (PhD) and was a Baltimore City Police Officer. He has authored three books: Cop in the Hood, In Defense of Flogging, and Greek Americans.

Me in 2000

Me in 2016

Critical Acclaim for Cop in the Hood

Cops like the book, Cop in the Hood:

"Should be made mandatory reading for every recruit in the Balto. City Police Academy. ... I am so proud that you were a Baltimore Police Officer and a good one." —Colonel (ret.) Margaret Patton, Baltimore City Police Department

"I just finished reading the last footnote! Great stuff." —NYPD Lt. Detective (ret.) David Durk

"I have been a cop now for 23 years and your book really captured what it's like to be a street cop. . . . Great book, great insights." —Detective-Commander Joseph Petrocelli

"Moskos strips away hard to decipher cop-speak and sociological mumbo jumbo and presents something easily digestible by the average reader.... Moskos is a veteran of a war [on drugs] he disagrees with. But he has walked the walk, respects the brotherhood and, as far as I’m concerned, still bleeds blue." —Pepper Spray Me

"Truly excellent.... Mandatory reading for all fans of The Wire and recommended for everyone else." —Tyler Cowen

"Ethnographic chutzpah.... Perhaps the best sociological account on what it means to police a modern ghetto.... Tells a great story centered around notions of race, power and social control." —Andrew Papachristos, American Journal of Sociology

"[An] objective, incisive and intelligent account of police work. Moskos's graphic descriptions of the drug culture... are the most detailed and analytical to be found anywhere. —Arnold Ages, Jewish Post & Opinion

It could have profound consequences.... In Defense of Flogging forces the reader to confront issues surrounding incarceration that most Americans would prefer not to think about. —Mansfield Frazier, The Daily Beast

“Flogging” is intriguing, even in — or because of — its shocking premise. As a case against prisons, Mr. Moskos' is airtight. —Washington Times

Compelling… Although his outrageous idea may conjure up unsavory reminders of U.S. slavery, by the end of “In Defense of Flogging,” Moskos might just have you convinced. —Salon

One of the very few public-policy books I've encountered that goes past wringing its hands over a societal problem.... Moskos's sharp little volume has a potential audience far beyond the experts. —Rich Fisher, Public Radio Tusla

A very important work... provocative, timely, and well-argued. I agree with you completely that our criminal justice system is out of control.... On one hand, the problems seem intractable. On the other hand, we're doomed if we don't do something about it. —(Former) CIA Agent John Kiriakou

It was, in truth, a book that I could not put down. I read it in two sittings (my butt was hurting after the first!)... You did well. —Gary Alan Fine, John Evans Professor of Sociology, Northwestern University.